For Pete's sake
No surprises yet. So far this is much the same tale you”ll have learnt in your ‘Keepin’ it real’ history lessons. The great Herc delivered the notion of playing the breaks from on high, picking out the choicest chunks of your mom and pop’s old records, and his disciples – Flash foremost – followed him into the promised land. But not so fast: there’s another key figure, more or less forgotten today, who played a vital role in the web of inspirations that led Flash to create his new science – Pete DJ Jones.
Like Herc, Pete Jones is a giant among men. He towers in at six foot eight with ham-sized hands that once played professional basketball. “Here is one dude that doesn’t have to wear any flashy clothes to stand out in a crowd,” wrote New York DJ fanzine Melting Pot in 1975. “When he lights a match, he looks like the Towering Inferno”.
“Music For All Occasions” advertises Pete’s business card and he still takes bookings at the age of 62. He’s just back from DJing a weekend at a holiday camp up in the Poconos and there’s a flyer in the lobby of his building advertising an upcoming R&B weekender for middle-aged Bronxsters with his name as a draw. Back in the day Pete Jones was one of the biggest DJs in the city, a name you heard constantly on party ads on WBLS. Today he’s squeezed behind the wheel of his little red hatch-back, with his knees hovering up near his chin. He gives a Deputy Dawg chuckle at his car’s poor fit and offers some melodic Carolina musings about the joys of fishing.
Pete was Flash’s greatest inspiration. Why? Because he kept the beat.
Pete Jones was the leading DJ in a scene which has never been accorded much importance. Plenty has now been written about disco’s gay black underground of the Loft, the Gallery and the Paradise Garage; this was disco’s straight black overground. It was a close-knit scene of mobile DJs who’d set up their rigs in hotel ballrooms (the Sheridan and notably the Diplomat, which Pete saw trashed by the crowd in a cross-state battle when he took on Newark’s finest DJs – Steak and Red) and in otherwise underpopulated restaurants. Places with names like Pub Theatrical, Jimmy’s, Gasky’s, Adrian’s, Hillside Manor, The Loft (no relation), Nell Gwynn’s… right across Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and New Jersey. Besides Pete, the other players were Cameron ‘Grandmaster’ Flowers, the scene’s founding big-shot who sadly ended his days panhandling outside Tower Records (and who was also an early graffiti writer), Maboya, a Panamanian who pioneered outdoor parties at Riis Beach before returning to Central America, and Ron Plummer a chemistry graduate who shot to fame as the scene’s Deejay Of The Year 1975 before heading off to medical school in Boston. The biggest boost to their fortunes, Pete recalls, was the beef crisis of 1971, which left restaurants empty and desperate. As ‘Where’s the beef?’ became the catchphrase of the day, disco came to the rescue with wily promoters turning eateries into niteries. “After they’d finished serving the last meal they’d start throwing the tables to one side and put the chairs on top of each other, put a makeshift bar up and the place would be jam packed until four in the morning.”
Pete, a teacher by career, got his DJing start in 1970, just after he’d moved from Raleigh to New York, by promoting a Bronx party around the first Grambling-Morgan game, a black college football fixture. After hiring a room but unable to book a DJ, he decided to do the job himself. “I went down to Sam Ash and bought the speakers and everything. I put this system together, went out and bought the top 20 and rocked the house. The party was so successful that the guy gave me the back room of the club every Friday and Saturday.” Later the same year he covered for a no-show Grandmaster Flowers in a jam on 57th St and his downtown reputation was launched
Through the seventies Pete played his punters what they wanted to hear: the length and breadth of the Billboard R&B chart sprinkled through with plenty of funky oldies and a smattering of more obscure southern soul. “You know what this is?” he asks as he picks out songs from a stack of dusty sleeveless 45s in his dark and crammed apartment. “It’s gut-bucket music. Yeah… gut-bucket music, poverty music.” An Ann Winley tune gets an airing, then ‘JB’s ‘Monorail’, then Grover Washington’s ‘Mister Magic’, Leon Haywood’s ‘Believe Half Of What You See’, Curtis Mayfield singing ‘Can’t Save Nothing’. “Gut-bucket music is stuff like James Brown, BB King, Johnny Taylor, Tyrone Davis, Dr. John,” he explains. “When I went downtown and played in a club and everybody’s dressed up, I’d play more of the stuff that was on the radio’ – and he draws out a list of commercial hits ranging from Kool & The Gang to the Bee Gees and Donna Summer. But his heart lies with music slowed by the heat of the southern states. ‘I used to hear other DJs saying, “That Pete Jones’ music, it puts me to sleep! Because it’s too slow.” It’s that special beat. It’s that downbeat. It’s the only music they listen to down south.”
While the music they played was hardly ground-breaking, rarely veering too far from the playlists of black radio, Pete and his peers were key in spreading the innovations of the more underground clubs to a wider audience, an audience that included the black population of the Bronx. Beatmatching, cuts and blends (or “running” records, as Pete calls it) were required skills on the gay scene thanks to pioneers like Terry Noel, Francis Grasso, Steve D’Acquisto and Michael Cappello. Grandmaster Flowers, who’d been playing since 1967, as well as Plummer, Maboya and Pete Jones himself, deserve credit for developing the same skills at the same time and – crucial to our story – for showing them off to the wide world of greater New York.
“They would say that Flowers was a mixer and I was a chopper,” says Pete, describing Grandmaster Flowers’ style as being closest to the DJs in the gay clubs. “Flowers was an expert mixer. He didn’t chop too many of the records, he would bleeend. Plummer was a mixer also, but I liked to chop, I liked to get the beat – BANG! BANG! – I loved to chop. Even before I had a cueing system, I liked to chop them records up.” Emphasising his claims, Pete says he had two copies of everything. “I’d play a record over and over again, because you didn’t have many hits in those days, and you had to keep playing until four or five in the morning. So you’d play it over again and you’d shine a light on that groove and play it awhile. Best part of the record is usually that groove part,” he says with a chuckle.
